Pylint’s main author and maintainer for the first ten years of its life has been
Sylvain Thénault, while he worked at Logilab where the project was born. For a
full list of contributors, see the “Contributors” section of Pylint’s README
file.

Since Pylint 1.4, we support only Python 2.7+ and Python 3.3+.
Using this strategy really helps in maintaining a code base compatible
with both versions and from this benefits not only the maintainers,
but the end users as well, because it’s easier to add and test
new features.
If support for Python 2.6 is absolutely required, then the version
from pylint-1.3 branch can be used. It will receive backports of
bug fixes for a while.

Pylint expects the name of a package or module as its argument. As a
convenience,
you can give it a file name if it’s possible to guess a module name from
the file’s path using the python path. Some examples :

“pylint mymodule.py” should always work since the current working
directory is automatically added on top of the python path

“pylint directory/mymodule.py” will work if “directory” is a python
package (i.e. has an __init__.py file) or if “directory” is in the
python path.

“pylint /whatever/directory/mymodule.py” will work if either:

“/whatever/directory” is in the python path

your cwd is “/whatever/directory”

“directory” is a python package and “/whatever” is in the python
path

“directory” is a python package and your cwd is “/whatever” and so
on...

3.2 Where is the persistent data stored to compare between successive runs?¶

Analysis data are stored as a pickle file in a directory which is
localized using the following rules:

value of the PYLINTHOME environment variable if set

”.pylint.d” subdirectory of the user’s home directory if it is found

(not always findable on Windows platforms)

”.pylint.d” directory in the current directory

3.3 How do I find the option name (for pylintrc) corresponding to a specific command line option?¶

You can always generate a sample pylintrc file with –generate-rcfile
Every option present on the command line before this will be included in
the rc file

With Pylint < 0.25, add “#pylint: disable-all” at the beginning of the
module. Pylint 0.26.1 and up have renamed that directive to
“#pylint: skip-file” (but the first version will be kept for backward
compatibility).

In order to ease finding which modules are ignored a Information-level message
file-ignored is emited. With recent versions of Pylint, if you use the old
syntax, an additional deprecated-disable-all message is emited.

4.5 I have a callback function where I have no control over received arguments. How do I avoid getting unused argument warnings?¶

Prefix (ui) the callback’s name by cb_, as in cb_onclick(...). By
doing so arguments usage won’t be checked. Another solution is to
use one of the names defined in the “dummy-variables” configuration
variable for unused argument (“_” and “dummy” by default).

Pychecker and Pylint use different approaches. pychecker
imports the modules and rummages around in the result, hence it sees my
mangled sys.path. Pylint doesn’t import any of the candidate modules and
thus doesn’t include any of import’s side effects (good and bad). It
traverses an AST representation of the code.